Portable electronic devices have gained widespread use and provide a variety of functions including, for example, telephonic, electronic messaging, text messaging, and other personal information manager (PIM) application functions. Portable electronic devices include, for example, several types of mobile stations such as simple cellular telephones, smart telephones, wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs), and laptop computers with wireless communication capabilities based on, for example, the 802.11 or Bluetooth® communications protocols.
Commonly, in order to accurately display a message that is in a particular language on a portable electronic device, a character set corresponding to the particular language must be installed on the device. Smaller portable electronic devices such as smart telephones and PDAs typically have limited memory resources, and as a result, users of such devices typically choose to install character sets corresponding to only a few languages. Nevertheless, as portable electronic devices have gained in popularity, a wider variety of languages are used for message communication.
The disincentive to install a variety of character sets on portable electronic devices, combined with the increase in the variety of languages used to communicate messages between users of portable electronic devices, has contributed to an increase in situations where a portable electronic device receives a message that it is unable to display. Likewise, senders of messages bound for portable electronic devices are more likely to be unfamiliar with the language capabilities of recipient portable electronic devices, and consequently more likely to send messages to recipient devices that are not displayable on these devices.